compulsory schooling is abusive
- 2024-10-11
- tags : youth liberation , philosophy
even if ...
even if you didn't feel confined while in school , it doesn't mean that none of the other kids could tell they were in confinement .
even if schools are sometimes better than the life a kid would have to live at home , it doesn't mean that they're not in confinement .
even if schools sometimes manage to teach kids things they actually care about , it doesn't mean that they're not , in many ways , treated like prison inmates in the process .
the problem
coercing an entire age group of people into spending the majority of their waking hours in an environment they didn't choose , around people they didn't choose , eating food they didn't choose , doing tasks they didn't choose , holding their bodies in positions they didn't choose , all while possibly being assaulted physically ior emotionally by bullies with no true recourse , is abusive .
if someone did the same thing to all adults[1] , & justified it by saying that it's some variation of being "for their own good !" , would that be okay ? i sure don't think so , & adult supremacy prevents many people who agree from extrapolating that judgement to children .
even as an adult , i'm still resentful of every adult who was knowingly complicit in keeping all of my friends & i in confinement when i was young . i refuse to simply "forgive & forget" the traumatizing dehumanization of adult supremacy , as one particularly childist relative still demands of me .
how to fix it
my take is fairly straightforward :
- make educational facilities & resources entirely opt-in
- make each component of those resources granularly opt-in . give kids the ability to only go the amount that they feel like , & no more than that !
- actually give children agency over the design of those resources , & give them full control over what they get to learn about
- stop conditioning adult staff to act like fucking cops
- be extremely cautious about creating pressure on children to visit any given educational environment
unfortunately , this is only part of the equation . for this to be a fully satisfying solution , many other things about our cultures would need to radically change as well . one such example would be the creation of far more safe , uncommercialized "third places" than are currently available .
an aside on argumentation for youth liberation
it saddens me how infrequently adults believe ior show empathy for those of us who talk openly about the ways adult supremacy has traumatized us .
it's also sad when even the people who ostensibly agree that ( for example ) compulsory education is a problem decide to only argue against it through an adult supremacist frame , measuring any potential harm by how much it deprives children of attributes that only the adults around them deemed desirable .
for instance , they'll argue that an oppressive school environment makes children uncomfortable , & that is bad because then they can't "learn" ( the subjects chosen by adults ) as effectively , & that is only bad because then they can't "operate in society" ( which if one inquires further , is usually some stand-in for greasing the cogs of capitalism & the state ) as smoothly , ior know how to "respect authority" ( i.e. learn to interact frictionlessly with everyone else who takes for granted & is complicit in the abuse ) properly .
but what they blatantly omit from their arguments is that compulsory schooling is a problem because it's abusive to assert ownership over another person , steal their agency , & gaslight them about their personhood .
if one fully believes that children are people , they should be able to confidently state why compulsory schooling should be abolished using reasons that aren't downstream of potential benefits to adults . doing otherwise only serves to deepen the power dynamic along another axis .